


Old and New

by acetheticallyy (jacquesdernier)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Ambiguous Relationships, Fluff, Implied Relationships, M/M, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-16
Updated: 2014-06-16
Packaged: 2018-02-04 23:15:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,263
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1796911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jacquesdernier/pseuds/acetheticallyy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>reclusiveq asked: post-ws bucky casually bringing up how much he loved his old blue jacket from his time in the Howling Commandos (because it was a gift from Steve), so Steve tries to get another one for him</p>
            </blockquote>





	Old and New

"Hey, you remember that old jacket I used to have?"

Steve looks up from the notepad he had been scribbling on. “What jacket?”

"Oh come on Steve, don’t tell me my memory is better than yours, I’ve barely been myself for three months."

And what a great three months it had been. After the whole mess with figuring out that Bucky was the Winter Soldier and waking up in a hospital bed after he was sure he had drowned, he had made it his personal duty to get his friend back and make sure he was okay.

Well, alright, so Sam made him stay home and rest for at least a month before he went out to find Bucky, but in return Sam helped him every step of the way and he supposed it was a fair trade off.

Flash forward two very cold, very wet months traveling around Europe trying to track him down ( _"why did I let him talk me into this, I can’t remember what dry socks feel like" "Sam, I can hear you. And besides, you offered"_ ) and Bucky showed up in one of the safe houses they had been staying in. Three weeks later, they went back to the states, found a nice apartment in Brooklyn, and that brought them to where they are now.

It wasn’t to say that the three months he had been back weren’t full of countless sleepless nights and one or two (or twenty) arguments about morality, but they were back at each other’s sides and Bucky was getting better every day, so who really cared about the details.

Bucky snaps his fingers in front of Steve’s face to gain his attention. “Hey. Steve. You okay in there?”

"Yeah, just thinking. Which jacket?"

"The blue one I had during the war. You got it for me after that stupid rescue move you pulled." And wow, Bucky really wasn’t going to let that one go, was he, seventy years of brainwashing or no.

Ignoring the slight insult (and really, could it even be counted as an insult if he was smiling fondly as he said it?), Steve finds himself remembering. “That jacket! I got it for you because you wouldn’t shut up about how cold it was.”

"Well excuse me, I had been tortured for god knows how long and I figured the least you could do was use your Captain America charm to get me a nice warm jacket." And it’s not funny, it’s not funny at all, because Steve was scared half to death when he found Bucky tortured and bleeding in that hydra base, but Bucky’s joking and there’s only the slightest bit of sadness in his eyes as he says it so he manages to give a small, halfhearted chuckle anyway.

"What about the jacket?" he asks, because if he keeps thinking about what happened to Bucky in that base he’s going to lose it, and he’d really rather talk about mundane things like jackets and why Bucky is so interested in it now when he’d never brought up anything about the war until then.

Bucky shrugs. “It was nice. Warm. I’ve been thinking that I kind of miss having nice things.”

It wasn’t like they had many nice things before, but Steve thinks that compared to what he had with the Soviets, their crappy one bedroom apartment with paper thin walls and a heater that only worked every now and again sounded like a dream.

-

Steve has since then spent countless hours trying to find another one, but all he can find is the replica they have on display at the smithsonian and he’s not even going to try and take that one because while they had been pretty understanding of his stealing his old suit back, they had still gotten better security and he figures that even though he’s Captain America he’s not going to have much luck this time around.

He thinks it’s probably impossible to find one exactly like it—hell he hadn’t spent half as long looking for it when he first bought it in the forties, had just walked into a shop and bought the first warm jacket he saw—but he keeps looking anyway.

After a few weeks, he figures he should give up, because he’s not sure why he cares so much anyway, but he does and so he ends up calling Pepper instead because she’s the person least likely to make fun of him for it.

As it turns out, calling Pepper is what he should have done in the first place, because within a half hour she’s tracked down a little shop in Manhattan that custom makes clothes if you give them an idea of what you’re looking for. He thanks her profusely and goes down one weekend with a few sketches and a note of what he thinks the fabric was. They tell him it should be done in two weeks.

-

Two weeks later, he picks up the jacket in Manhattan and goes back to the apartment, hoping Bucky’s still there and not out with Clint or Natasha like he’s been doing lately. It’s not that he minds, in fact he loves that Bucky’s finally made friends with the other avengers, but he’d really rather not wait to give it to him any longer. He’s kept it a secret this long and a few more hours might not seem like much but now that he finally has it, he thinks it might just kill him to wait.

"Hey, Bucky!" he calls out as soon as he gets through the door. The force of his grin practically splits his face in two when he’s met with "in the kitchen!"

Steve tries to calm down a little bit before walking into the kitchen by taking a few deep breaths, but it doesn’t really work, so he figures “what the hell” and goes in anyway with a slightly smaller smile on his face.

He drops the box in front of Bucky, who looks up from the newspaper with a questioning look in his eyes. “What’s this?”

"Just open it."

"It’s not my birthday…right?"

"No, just open it."

"Is it going to explode?"

"Bucky, Jesus Christ,  _open the box_.”

"All right, all right, calm down, _Jesus_ ," Bucky says, finally reaching out and taking the top of the box. He throws the tissue paper out of the way and starts smiling as soon as he sees the fabric. "You did not, you  _punk._ " And even though it’s a very humid ninety degrees outside, he slips his arms through the sleeves as soon as he lifts it out of the box.

"It’s not the same one, obviously, because they never found that, and the only one I could really find was at the smithsonian, but I thought it would be a bad idea to break in again, especially under less dire circumstances, so I asked Pepper, and—"

"Steve. Shut up. I like it. It’s great." Then he’s smiling, and Steve can’t help but smile wider than he had been earlier because suddenly Bucky's arms are surrounding him in a hug and in the three months Bucky has been recovering he had never touched Steve with the metal arm on purpose.

And somehow, everything seems okay, because they’re  _happy_ and it doesn’t matter that they could get called out to fight aliens in the next five minutes, or that one of them could die saving the world in the next year. Right now, they were happy, and it seemed like they could take on anything.

**Author's Note:**

> This will be part of a series, but none of them are going to be related to each other in any way, other than the fact that all characters involved will be happy and safe and loved.
> 
> [newly edited as of May 29, 2015]


End file.
